Organised religion has corrupted one of the purest, most powerful and sustaining things in the human condition. It has imposed a middle management, not only in our politics and in our finances, but in our spirituality as well.
		-- Alan Moore
%
Conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting... the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.
		-- Alan Moore
%
Admittedly, I do have several bones -- whole war fields full of bones, in fact -- to pick with organised religion of whatever stripe.
		-- Alan Moore
%
Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.
		-- Alan Moore
%
There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.
		-- Alan Moore
%
I can't see coherent political structures in the traditional sense lasting beyond the next twenty years, I don't think that would be possible.
		-- Alan Moore
%
Fascism becomes less and less possible. We have to accept that we are moving towards some sort of anarchy.
		-- Alan Moore
%
Capitalism and communism felt like they were always going to be around, but it turns out they were just two ways of ordering an industrial society. If you were looking for more fundamental human political poles, you'd take anarchy and fascism, for my money.
		-- Alan Moore
%
No one wants a boss, to be a boss, to work under a boss. The people you like working with are the people you respect as individuals.
		-- Alan Moore
%
Things tend to organise themselves. If there is any message from contemporary science, it is surely that.
		-- Alan Moore
%
We need genuine democracy, the definition of which is "the people shall rule."
		-- Alan Moore
%
Class is massively underrepresented in literature. Most books are written for the middle class, and generally they only have two modes of talking about the working class. The first is a kind of lofty contempt at the vulgarity, the stupidity of those people. The second is a kind of patronizing concern, which paints the working class as nothing but victims.
		-- Alan Moore
%
All laws are wicked, all judgments are unfair, all judges are wrong, all prisoners are innocent.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
You who are resigned, look: I spit on your idols. I spit on God, the Fatherland, I spit on Christ, I spit on the flag, I spit on capital and the golden calf; I spit on laws and Codes, on the symbols of religion; they are baubles, I could not care less about them, I laugh at them...
		-- Albert Libertad
%
Those that envision the goal from the first steps, those that want the certitude of reaching it before walking never arrive.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
Resignation is death. Revolt is life.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
Go ahead, vote! Have faith in your delegates, believe in those you have voted for. But if you voted, don't complain.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
Do something right for once: throw off the straitjacket of legislation; wash yourself off, and clean your body, the social body, of all the parasites and vermin that are devouring you. And then -- only then -- will you be able to fully come to life.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
You complain, but you want to maintain the system where you vegetate. Occasionally you rebel, but it's only ever just to start doing the same thing again from scratch.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
We must tear down the pyramids, the tumuli, the tombs. We must bring the wheelbarrows into the cemeteries so as to rid humanity of what they call respect for the dead, but which is the cult of carrion.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
To go towards freedom, it becomes necessary to develop our individuality.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
Libertarians make a dogma of liberty; anarchists make it an end.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
To truly know freedom, one must develop the human being until one makes sure that no authority has the possibility of existing.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
No, it is not life that is bad, but the conditions in which we live. Therefore we shall address ourselves not to life, but to these conditions: let us change them.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
We don't have faith; we have absolutely no confidence in our success.
		-- Albert Libertad
%
If your object is to secure liberty, you must learn to do without authority and compulsion.
		-- Alexander Berkman
%
It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.
		-- Alexander Berkman
%
May the enemies of the people be terrified at the unexpected awakening.
		-- Alexander Berkman
%
It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation.
		-- Alexander Berkman
%
Terrorism is tempting with its tremendous possibilities. It offers a mechanical solution, as it were, in hopeless situations.
		-- Alexander Berkman
%
It is capitalism and government which stand for disorder and violence. Anarchism is the very reverse of it; it means order without government and peace without violence.
		-- Alexander Berkman
%
And as you are invaded and violated, so you subconsciously revenge yourself by invading and violating others over whom you have authority or can exercise compulsion. physical or moral. In this way all life has become a crazy quilt of authority, of domination and submission, of command and obedience, of coercion and subjection, of rulers and ruled, of violence and force in a thousand and one forms.
		-- Alexander Berkman
%
The fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered although obviously innocent proves only one thing: that the concept of innocence and guilt is not an objective fact but is a measure imposed by the class struggle.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
Being an anarchist does not mean one has reached a certainty or said once and for all, "There, from now on I hold the truth and as such, at least from the point of view of the idea, I am a privileged person." Anyone who thinks like this is an anarchist in word alone.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
Never ever separate thought from action, the things we know, the things we understand, from the things we do, the things with which we carry out our actions.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
So that is why anarchists keep coming back to the question of what anarchism is. Because anarchism is not a political movement. Or rather it is, but only in a minor aspect.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
Now, in a situation where the working class has practically disintegrated, the possibility of an expropriation of the means of production no longer exists.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
A small group of comrades, a small group who simply meet in the evening to have a chat would not be an affinity group but a group of friends, pub-mates who meet in the evenings to talk about anything under the sun.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
What would have happened if one had really managed to enter the base and destroy it? I don't know. Probably nothing, possibly everything.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
The world does not belong to us. If it has a master who is stupid enough to want it the way it is, let him have it.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
We are certain that communities of joy will emerge from our struggle here and now. And for the first time life will triumph over death.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
When [the synthesis anarchist organization] develops itself fully (as happened in Spain in '36) it begins to dangerously resemble a party. Synthesis becomes control.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
In an informal organization there is no question of synthesis.
		-- Alfredo Bonanno
%
In the face of dogmas, of despots, of the sentimental, of charlatans and regimenters, humanity's future belongs to reason.
		-- Andre Lorulot
%
In the midst of the unspeakable chaos of philosophies of all kinds and of various moralities we can cull out the constant and persistent tendency which pushes the individual towards life. Towards an ever better life, freer and more noble: that is, towards happiness.
		-- Andre Lorulot
%
Man will only be able to act usefully when he will have managed to destroy all lies, freed himself from all the superstitions given birth to by error, sought the truth in the jumble of knowledge and observations.
		-- Andre Lorulot
%
The individualist is like a wolf who prefers the dangers of liberty to the routine of domestication. Individualists compare themselves to the bird who would prefer to suffer and struggle on its branch than to die a slow death in the servitude of a gilded cage.
		-- Andre Lorulot
%
People, beware of demagogues. They are your worst enemies. They caress you only so they can better shear you.
		-- Andre Lorulot
%
I passionately love humanity, and have dedicated my best efforts to the fight for the oppressed. All tyrants disgust me -- and all those who put up with them, adulate them, support them. After having brought them down will I make myself a tyrant in their place? I would be disgusted with myself.
		-- Andre Lorulot
%
Parliament: A compound word from "parler" (to speak) and "mentir" (to lie).
		-- Anonymous
%
History is written by the victors.
		-- Anonymous
%
Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism, or socialism, means the reorganization of society upon scientific principles and the abolition of causes which produce vice and crime. Capitalism first produces these social diseases and then seeks to cure them by punishment.
		-- August Spies
%
The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.
		-- August Spies
%
I say, if death is the penalty for proclaiming truth, then I will proudly and defiantly pay the costly price! Truth crucified in Socrates, in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, Galileo still lives -- they and others whose number is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow!
		-- August Spies
%
Then hang us! Here we will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up.
		-- August Spies
%
Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place, some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.
		-- Banksy
%
We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.
		-- Banksy
%
People who should be shot: Fascist thugs, religious fundamentalists, people who write lists telling you who should be shot.
		-- Banksy
%
The art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.
		-- Banksy
%
The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages. As a precaution to ever committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we're told, this is the only way we can be sure.
		-- Banksy
%
You can win the rat race but you're still a rat.
		-- Banksy
%
The state is the most gigantic criminal extant. It manufactures criminals much faster than it punishes them.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Education is a slow process, and may not come too quickly.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Anarchists who endeavor to hasten it by joining in the propaganda of state socialism or revolution make a sad mistake indeed.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Liberty enters the field of journalism to speak for herself because she finds no one willing to speak for her.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Many claim to speak in liberty's name, but few really understand her.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is liberty's work, and "Down with Authority" her war-cry.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
The two principles referred to are authority and liberty, and the names of the two schools of socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, state socialism and anarchism.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between state socialism and anarchism.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
This brings us to anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the state should be abolished.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the state.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Aggression is simply another name for government.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
The anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Where crime exists, force must exist to repress it. Who denies it? Certainly not liberty; certainly not the anarchists.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
Once for all, then, we are not opposed to the punishment of thieves and murderers; we are opposed to their manufacture.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
The population of the world is gradually dividing into two classes, anarchists and criminals.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
The State is said by some to be a "necessary evil"; it must be made unnecessary.
		-- Benjamin Tucker
%
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
		-- Bertrand Russell
%
Nine-tenths of the activities of modern government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.
		-- Bertrand Russell
%
I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
		-- Bertrand Russell
%
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
		-- Bertrand Russell
%
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
		-- Bertrand Russell
%
Patriotism: a willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
		-- Bertrand Russell
%
I dislike communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.
		-- Bertrand Russell
%
I think my basic viewpoint is that everything the left and right say about each other is true. And the reason it's true is because they have so much in common.
		-- Bob Black
%
Basically, revolutionaries never go far enough, and if they're not going to go far enough, they should stop upsetting people. Or killing them, for that matter.
		-- Bob Black
%
A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs.
		-- Bob Black
%
To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst.
		-- Bob Black
%
To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who'd abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else.
		-- Bob Black
%
Freedom means more than the right to change masters.
		-- Bob Black
%
No one should ever work... In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
		-- Bob Black
%
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious.
		-- Bob Black
%
A worker is a part-time slave.
		-- Bob Black
%
The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans.
		-- Bob Black
%
Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.
		-- Bob Black
%
Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.
		-- Bob Black
%
No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!
		-- Bob Black
%
Most anarchists are, frankly, incapable of living in an autonomous cooperative manner. A lot of them aren't very bright. They tend to peruse their own classics and insider literature to the exclusion of broader knowledge of the world we live in.
		-- Bob Black
%
The history of anarchism is a history of unparalleled defeat and martyrdom, yet anarchists venerate their victimized forebears with a morbid devotion which occasions suspicion that the anarchists, like everybody else, think that the only good anarchist is a dead one.
		-- Bob Black
%
Given a choice between anarchism and anarchy, most anarchists would go for the anarchism ideology and subculture rather than take a dangerous leap into the unknown, into a world of stateless liberty.
		-- Bob Black
%
Every organization has more in common with every other organization than it does with any of the unorganized.
		-- Bob Black
%
I stubbornly persist in my opposition to the state. But not because, as anarchists so often thoughtlessly declaim, the state is not "necessary". Ordinary people dismiss this anarchist assertion as ludicrous, and so they should. Obviously, in an industrialized class society like ours, the state is necessary.
		-- Bob Black
%
We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism. Then, and only then, we can begin to get serious about fomenting anarchy.
		-- Bob Black
%
Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy -- anarchism minus Marxism -- will be free to get better at being what it is.
		-- Bob Black
%
A syndicalist is more likely to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this dullest of all anarchisms attracts some of the most irrational and hysterical adherents.
		-- Bob Black
%
Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way -- better yet, the ways -- to a free future.
		-- Bob Black
%
I do not want to unite with the multitude of those who flatter the proletariat, excusing them, praising them, adorning them with wreathes.
		-- Bruno Filippi
%
The people are conservative: they are satisfied with the society they find. The minority are innovators instead and therefore they rebel.
		-- Bruno Filippi
%
I have a god (dio) like everyone else; but this god is myself (io).
		-- Bruno Filippi
%
Rest in peace, poor Mata! Someone who never knew you has sworn to avenge you. And the memory of your blood-drenched eyes will drive his dagger; the vision of your mutilated body will render his bomb more effective.
		-- Bruno Filippi
%
Maybe I am crazy. But my madness is the most terrible rationality. I see further, I feel life more vividly.
		-- Bruno Filippi
%
I know that I live and that I desire to live.
		-- Bruno Filippi
%
I envy the savages. And I will cry to them in a loud voice: "Save yourselves, civilization is coming."
		-- Bruno Filippi
%
Whereas we anarchists desire the extinction of the state through the social revolution and the constitution of an autonomist federal order, the Leninists desire the destruction of the bourgeois state and moreover the conquest of the state by the "proletariat."
		-- Camillo Berneri
%
Whoever says "proletarian State" says "State Capitalism" whoever says "dictatorship of the Proletariat" says "Dictatorship of the Communist Party;" whoever says "strong government" says "Tsarist oligarchy of politicians."
		-- Camillo Berneri
%
The Bolshevik government revealed itself to be powerless in the face of a bureaucracy which is super-abundant, parasitic, despotic and dishonest.
		-- Camillo Berneri
%
You anarchist ministers, you make eloquent speeches and you write brilliant articles, but it is not with speeches and articles that one wins the war and defends the revolution.
		-- Camillo Berneri
%
Whosoever looks back on the history of socialism after the exclusion of the anarchists can see for themselves the gradual degeneration of Marxism as a political philosophy through the interpretations and practices of the social democrats.
		-- Camillo Berneri
%
Leninism constitutes, without any doubt, a return to the revolutionary spirit of Marxism, but it also constitutes a return to the fallacies and abstractions of Marxist metaphysics.
		-- Camillo Berneri
%
I offered to stay awake to let the others go to sleep, and everyone laughed, saying that I would not even hear the cannon! But afterwards, one by one, they fell asleep, and I am watchful over all of them, while working for those who are to come.
		-- Camillo Berneri
%
One can lose one's illusions about everything and about everyone, but not about what one affirms with one's moral conscience.
		-- Camillo Berneri
%
Comrades, let us hurry on the revolution as quickly as we can, since, as you see, our enemies are letting us die like this -- in prison or in exile, or crazed with sorrow.
		-- Carlo Cafiero
%
Anarchy, today, is attack; it is war against every authority, every power, every state. In the future society, anarchy will be defence, the prevention of the re-establishment of any authority, any power, any state.
		-- Carlo Cafiero
%
We must be communists because we are anarchists, because anarchy and communism are the two essential terms of the revolution.
		-- Carlo Cafiero
%
We have said and we shall not stop repeating it: no intermediaries, no agents and obedient servants who always end by becoming the real masters!
		-- Carlo Cafiero
%
We have no need to get involved with the games of our oppressors, unless we wish to take part in their oppression.
		-- Carlo Cafiero
%
Power makes you drunk, and the best, when invested with authority, become the worst.
		-- Carlo Cafiero
%
When society refuses you the right to exist, you have to take it and not help it along, which is cowardice.
		-- Clement Duval
%
You have accused me of theft, as if a worker that has nothing could be a thief.
		-- Clement Duval
%
Anarchy is the negation of all authority.
		-- Clement Duval
%
The anarchists have but one party, and that is humanity.
		-- Clement Duval
%
Ah well, this is the crime that I am here for: for not recognizing the right of these people to die of plenty while the producers, the creators of all social wealth, starve.
		-- Clement Duval
%
I am not a robber but one who has been robbed, someone who brings justice, who says that everything belongs to everyone, and that it is this clear logic of the anarchist idea, which makes your legs tremble.
		-- Clement Duval
%
I am not a thief but a sincere revolutionary, who has the courage of his convictions and who is devoted to his cause.
		-- Clement Duval
%
What consoles me is that there are combatants that remain, because despite all the persecution, the anarchist idea has germinated and the theoretical revolution is ending, being quickly replaced by the practice of action.
		-- Clement Duval
%
The word anarchist seems to me too restrictive and I don't use it unless it is joined by the word communist.
		-- Daniel Guerin
%
Libertarian communism is as yet only an approximation, and not a dogma of absolute truth.
		-- Daniel Guerin
%
As far as the problem of the state goes, the lesson of the Russian revolution is written on the wall for all to see.
		-- Daniel Guerin
%
Private capitalism, condemned by history, only survives today thanks to the arms race on the one hand, and the comparative failure of state communism on the other.
		-- Daniel Guerin
%
Was traditional anarchism, idealistic and prone to splits, not destined to fail as soon as it found itself confronted by an implacable social struggle, for which it was not in the least way prepared?
		-- Daniel Guerin
%
We do not fetishize organization, but in order to elaborate and defend this struggle, organization is a necessity.
		-- Daniel Guerin
%
Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.
		-- David Graeber
%
Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians... Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists... None are named after some great thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle.
		-- David Graeber
%
Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.
		-- David Graeber
%
Our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.
		-- David Graeber
%
"Communist society"; in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle -- could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.
		-- David Graeber
%
In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.
		-- David Graeber
%
The criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.
		-- David Graeber
%
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
		-- David Graeber
%
What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
		-- David Graeber
%
We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of out existence. It's as if as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap out hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up.
		-- David Graeber
%
If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn't capitalism.
		-- David Graeber
%
At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.
		-- David Graeber
%
Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free.
		-- David Graeber
%
Take the principle that two wrongs don't make a right. If you really took it seriously, that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and the criminal justice system.
		-- David Graeber
%
The critical human flaw is not that as a species we're particularly aggressive. It's that we tend to respond to aggression very poorly.
		-- David Graeber
%
It's one thing to say, "Another world is possible." It's another to experience it, however momentarily.
		-- David Graeber
%
Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
		-- Edward Abbey
%
We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
		-- Edward Abbey
%
An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.
		-- Edward Abbey
%
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
		-- Edward Abbey
%
Our destiny is to reach that state of ideal perfection in which nations will no longer need to be under the tutelage of a government or of another nation; it is the absence of government, it is anarchy, the highest expression of order.
		-- Elisee Reclus
%
Instead of entrusting the defence of your interests to others, see to the matter by yourselves. Instead of trying to choose advisers that will guide you in future actions, do the thing yourselves, and do it now! Men of good will shall not have to look long in vain for the opportunity. To put on others' shoulders the responsibility of one's actions is cowardice.
		-- Elisee Reclus
%
The morality which is born out of the present conception of the state and social hierarchy is necessarily corrupt.
		-- Elisee Reclus
%
I am sorry to see friends impelled by passion drifting to the idea of vengeance, which is so little scientific, so sterile. But armed defense of a right is not violence.
		-- Elisee Reclus
%
Side neither with nations nor with parties. Be neither Russians, Poles nor Slavs. Rather, be men who hunger for truth, free from any thoughts of particular interests, and from speculative ideas concerning the Chinese, Africans or Europeans. The patriot always ends up hating the foreigner, and loses the sense of justice that once kindled his enthusiasm.
		-- Elisee Reclus
%
Do not quarrel or deal in personalities. Listen to opposing arguments after you have presented your own. Learn how to remain silent and reflect. Do not try to get the better in an argument at the expense of your own sincerity.
		-- Elisee Reclus
%
You should reject every authority, but also commit yourself to a deep respect for all sincere convictions. Live your own life, but also allow others the complete freedom to live theirs.
		-- Elisee Reclus
%
Not to speak of war and its crimes, from the guilt of which no civilized state is free, can it be denied that chief among the consequences of the existing social system are murder, maladies, and death.
		-- Elisee Reclus
%
There is a conflict between the static and dynamic conceptions of anarchism, between those who want to gregarize and stabilize anarchism and those who want the revolutionary, individualist spirit to remain and simmer permanently within anarchism.
		-- Emile Armand
%
In anarchy, there are as many "moralities" as there are anarchists, taken individually, or groups or associations of anarchists. Thus, in anarchy, one is amoral.
		-- Emile Armand
%
The work of the anarchist is above all a work of critique. The anarchist goes, sowing revolt against that which oppresses, obstructs, opposes itself to the free expansion of the individual being.
		-- Emile Armand
%
The individualist anarchist is never accountable to anyone but himself for his acts and gestures.
		-- Emile Armand
%
All of the exploited, legal or illegal, cooperate in the state of domination.
		-- Emile Armand
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The anarchist individualists do not present themselves as proletarians, absorbed only in the search for material amelioration, tied to a class determined to transform the world and to substitute a new society for the actual one.
		-- Emile Armand
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When "voluntary association" is spoken of, voluntary adhesion to a plan, a project, a given action, this implies the possibility of refusing the association, adhesion or action.
		-- Emile Armand
%
We are apolitical and take no part in party quarrels. In all spheres we are for the voluntary against the obligatory; for consent against imposition; for reason against violence; for free examination against dogmatism.
		-- Emile Armand
%
Anarchists no more want to be masters than they want to be servants -- they no more want to exercise violence than to submit to it. They expose, they propose, but they do not impose.
		-- Emile Armand
%
Once the individual owns his own tools and his product, capitalism ceases to exist.
		-- Emile Armand
%
Nor does [our kind of individualist] wish to have anything in common with those armchair Nietzcheans or weekend Stirnerites who imagine, poor wretches, that they are "affirming their individuality" by petty dishonesty in money matters, or by forcing themselves upon the companion of a friend in prison.
		-- Emile Armand
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I am absolutely convinced that only a small minority, a very small minority, among men, are seriously reached and profoundly moved by our propaganda of criticism, of doubt, of rebellion, of free investigation, of independent research. On the other hand, it is clear that our first interest lies always in seeking to increase this minority; to keep it, under all circumstances alive, active, refreshed. Our own happiness depends on it.
		-- Emile Armand
%
The individualist anarchist critiques to free themselves and others.
		-- Emile Armand
%
[President of the court]: This hand that we today see covered in blood. [Emile]: My hands are covered in blood, like your red robe is!
		-- Emile Henry
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In that pitiless war which we have declared on the bourgeoisie, we ask for no pity. We give death, and we know how to endure it.
		-- Emile Henry
%
The influence that theoretical anarchists pretend to wield over the revolutionary movement is nil. Today the field is open to action, without weakness or retreat.
		-- Emile Henry
%
Hanged in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted in Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and in Paris, our dead are many; but you have not been able to destroy anarchy.
		-- Emile Henry
%
Anarchy's roots go deep: its spouts from the bosom of a rotten society that is falling apart; it is a violent backlash against the established order; it stands for the aspirations to equality and liberty which have entered the lists against the current authoritarianism.
		-- Emile Henry
%
I had been told that society's institutions were founded on justice and equality, and all around me I could see nothing but lies and treachery.
		-- Emile Henry
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Drawn at first to socialism, I was not slow in separating myself from that party. I have too much love of freedom, too much respect for individual initiative, too much repugnance for military organization, to assume a number in the ordered army of the fourth estate.
		-- Emile Henry
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I do not believe in God, because I believe in man.
		-- Emma Goldman
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There are some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are ignorance, superstition, and bigotry -- the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
		-- Emma Goldman
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Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The police are making more anarchists than I could do in ten years.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled utopian.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.
		-- Emma Goldman
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Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.
		-- Emma Goldman
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True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force -- necessity.
		-- Emma Goldman
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After all, it means thirteen dollars per month, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Yet even necessity is not sufficiently strong a factor to bring into the army an element of character and manhood.
		-- Emma Goldman
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Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood -- a truly free society.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The authoritarian principle has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The inherent tendency of the state is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Revolution is indeed a violent process.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
If revolution results only in a change of dictatorship, then it is hardly worth while.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
In its mad passion for power, the communist state even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood -- these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society -- the communist state suppressed to the point of extermination.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS.
		-- Emma Goldman
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The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.
		-- Emma Goldman
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The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Today is the parent of tomorrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Our cause cannot expect me to become a nun and the movement will not be turned into a cloister.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman's soul.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Direct action is the logical, consistent method of anarchism.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!
		-- Emma Goldman
%
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
		-- Emma Goldman
%
Anarchists emphatically reject a morality which denies the original concepts of right and wrong.
		-- Erich Muhsam
%
The anarchist teaching prescribes no method of struggle and rejects none which is in harmony with self-determination and free will.
		-- Erich Muhsam
%
The freedom of everyone, and thereby the freedom of each individual, requires community in socialism.
		-- Erich Muhsam
%
The demand for equality is nothing other than the demand: equal rights for all!
		-- Erich Muhsam
%
The complete transformation of everyone's living conditions can never be achieved on the path of slow development, through which at most improvements within a social system are possible.
		-- Erich Muhsam
%
We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.
		-- Errico Malatesta
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By anarchist spirit I mean that deeply human sentiment, which aims at the good of all, freedom and justice for all, solidarity and love among the people; which is not an exclusive characteristic only of self-declared anarchists, but inspires all people who have a generous heart and an open mind.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
What matters most is that people, all men, lose their sheepish instincts and habits that the millennial slavery inspired them, and they learn to think and act freely.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
Others invent more or less complicated system of mutuality. But in the long run it is always the searching for a more secure guarantee of freedom which is the common factor among anarchists, and which divides them into different schools.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
Individualist anarchism and communist anarchism are the same, or nearly so, in terms of moral motivations and ultimate goals.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
The "government of all the people", if we have to have government, can at best be only the government of the majority.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
Government means the right to make the law and to impose it on everyone by force: without a police force there is no government.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
We are neither for a majority nor for a minority government; neither for democracy not for dictatorship. We are for the abolition of the gendarme. We are for the freedom of all and for free agreement, which will be there for all when no one has the means to force others, and all are involved in the good running of society. We are for anarchy.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
The subject is not whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
Anarchism was born in a moral revolt against social injustice.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
Anarchy is not perfection, it is not the absolute ideal which like the horizon recedes as fast as we approach it; but it is the way open to all progress and all improvements for the benefit of everybody.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
If in order to win it were necessary to erect the gallows in the public square, then I would prefer to lose.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
For us, everything that seeks to destroy economic and political oppression, all that which serves to raise the moral and intellectual level of human beings, to give them the consciousness of their rights and of their forces and to persuade them to do their business by themselves, all that provokes hatred against oppression and love between people, brings us closer to our aim.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
Obviously, the revolution will produce many misfortunes, many sufferings; but if it produced one hundred times more of them, it would still be a blessing relative to what one endures today.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
It is from the love of humanity that we are revolutionaries: it is not our fault if history has forced on us this distressing necessity.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
Hate does not produce love; we will not renew the world by hate.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
The realization of the usefulness of cooperation, which should have led to the triumph of solidarity in all human relations, instead gave rise to private property and government, that is to the exploitation of the labor of the whole community by a privileged minority.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
If today we fall without compromising, we can be sure of victory tomorrow.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
The real sense of gradualism remains the same: everything in nature and in life changes by degrees, and this is no less true of anarchy. It can only come about little by little.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
The solutions to each problem must not only be the most economically viable ones but must respond to the imperatives of justice and liberty and be those most likely to keep open the way to future improvements. If necessary, justice, liberty and solidarity must take priority over economic benefit.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
There is no need to think in terms of destroying everything in the belief that things will look after themselves.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
It is the task of all comrades to think, study and prepare -- and to do so with all speed and thoroughly because the times are "dynamic" and we must be ready for what might happen.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
We must fight authority and privilege, while taking advantage from the benefits that civilization has conferred. We must not destroy anything that satisfies human need however badly -- until we have something better to put in its place.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
The task of the conscious minority is to profit from every situation to change the environment in a way that will make possible the education of the whole people.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
The anarchist ideals are far from being in contradiction, as the "scientific socialists" claim, to the laws of evolution as proved by science; they are a conception which fits these laws perfectly; they are the experimental system brought from the field of research to that of social realization.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
If you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing the election of a genius from the votes of a mass of fools?
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
What we want, therefore, is the complete destruction of the domination and exploitation of man by man; we want men united as brothers by a conscious and desired solidarity, all cooperating voluntarily for the well-being of all; we want society to be constituted for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well-being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development; we want bread, freedom, love, and science -- for everybody.
		-- Errico Malatesta
%
The love of liberty and the sense of human dignity are the basic elements of the anarchist creed.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
If all our comrades of Europe, America and other countries, who do not understand what we are doing to Spanish anarchism, would come to Spain, we could then see how they would react.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite -- a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
We need no messiah and no sterile conception of a god menacing us with hell and purgatory.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
The struggle is so great that the triumph over fascism alone is worth the sacrifice of our lives.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
In order to fully realise our aspirations, we must create in the masses of the people the sense of sacrifice and responsibility that has been the characteristic of the anarchist movement throughout its historic development in Spain.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
But we must create in each person a sense of responsibility in order that each one of us can have the right to enjoy all his rights.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
Never will the anarchists in Spain be made to suffer as they have been and are in Russia.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
Authority is something from which we are constantly subtracting, of which there remains always a residue, and which we attempt to make smaller and smaller.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
In Spain, we should have enough intelligence, enough sense of individual and collective responsibility to do for ourselves that which would be imposed upon us by a dictatorship.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
I wish to say that we anarchists have never changed our position. We are anarchists as of old and still pursue the same ideals.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
The people themselves, and only the people, determine the rhythm of our fight.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
There is, therefore, no solution possible other than an economy directed by the workers through their organizations of control -- through the workers' syndicates.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
We tried many times before to speed on the social revolution in Spain; attempted to stir up the feelings of the people and to raise the banner of libertarian communism.
		-- Frederica Montseny
%
Nobody believes or expects that the coming revolution, however formidable it should be, will realize unadulterated anarchist communism.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
While we do preach perfect communism, it is not in the certainty or expectation of communism's being the social form of the future: it is in order to further men's education, and round it off as completely as possible, so that, by the time that the day of conflagration comes, they will have attained maximum emancipation.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
Trades organization is still only in the embryonic stages. Once rid of politicians' tyranny, it can stride out freely and, like the child learning to take his first steps, toddle along the road of independence.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
Thus, on the one hand, the "unionised" are today in a position to understand, study and receive libertarian teachings: on the other, anarchists need not fear that, in taking part in the corporative movement, they will be required to forswear their independence.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
As moderate as they were, as sensible as they proved themselves to be, the founders of the Circle turned out to be too advanced in the judgment of the guardians of moral order.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
Writers: express your rage against all iniquities during all your waking hours.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
Painters: bring back to life, with your talent and your heart, the memory of the great revolts.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
Poets and musicians: launch your vibrant stanzas that awaken in the soul of the humble a sense of impatience with their servitude and, during those all-too-frequent moments of discouragement, refresh the ardor of the strong.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
Intellectuals: put yourself at the service of the weak. Meditate upon this; this is the really urgent work.
		-- Fernand Pelloutier
%
I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don't believe anything the government tells me.
		-- George Carlin
%
We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.
		-- George Carlin
%
Catholics and other Christians are against abortions and they're against homosexuals. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals?
		-- George Carlin
%
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you.
		-- George Carlin
%
It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
		-- George Carlin
%
Rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges.
		-- George Carlin
%
I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.
		-- George Carlin
%
I don't vote, because I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain.
		-- George Carlin
%
Everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do.
		-- George Carlin
%
"Whoever denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist," said Sebastien Faure. The definition is tempting in its simplicity, but simplicity is the first thing to guard against in writing a history of anarchism.
		-- George Woodcock
%
Anarchism, nihilism, and terrorism are often mistakenly equated, and in most dictionaries will be found at least two definitions of the anarchist. One presents him as a man who believes that government must die before freedom can live. The other dismisses him as a mere promoter of disorder who offers nothing in place of the order he destroys.
		-- George Woodcock
%
Like such titles as Christian and Quaker, "anarchist" was in the end proudly adopted by one of those against whom it had been used in condemnation.
		-- George Woodcock
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The main difference between the anarchists and the socialists, including the Marxists, lies in the fact that while the socialists maintain that the state must be taken over as the first step toward its dissolution, the anarchists argue that, since power corrupts, any seizure of the existing structure of authority can only lead to its perpetuation.
		-- George Woodcock
%
The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man.
		-- George Woodcock
%
The old motives of profit and self-interest will cease to dominate economic life. Instead the incentive will be the good of the members of society, without distinction.
		-- George Woodcock
%
Either it is true that humanity by intelligence and by the practice of mutual aid and direct action can reverse processes which appear socially inevitable, or humanity will become extinct by simple maladaptation.
		-- George Woodcock
%
The only generals that we should follow are the generals of the little tin soldiers.
		-- Georges Brassens
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Instead of taking aim at some vague enemy, it's better wait a moment for him to turn into a friend.
		-- Georges Brassens
%
All that marching music doesn't concern me.
		-- Georges Brassens
%
Good people don't much like those who tread a different path.
		-- Georges Brassens
%
The only revolution is to improve yourself, hoping that others follow. Then the world will improve.
		-- Georges Brassens
%
An anarchist is a man who is careful to always use pedestrian crossings, because he utterly detests talking with policemen.
		-- Georges Brassens
%
It is obvious that in order to act you need a body of coherent ideas. Contradictions and hesitations prevent ideas getting through.
		-- Georges Fontenis
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The [specifically anarchist] organization is not a union or contractual understanding between individuals bringing their own artificial ideological convictions. It arises and develops as an organic, natural way because it corresponds to a real need.
		-- Georges Fontenis
%
The act of revolution brings an immediate transformation in the sense that the foundations of society are radically changed, but a progressive transformation in the sense that communism is a constant development.
		-- Georges Fontenis
%
The best defense for the new society lies in it asserting its revolutionary character because this quickly creates conditions in which no attempt at a restoration of the bourgeoisie will find a solid base.
		-- Georges Fontenis
%
There is nothing proletarian -- or revolutionary about immoralist cynicism.
		-- Georges Fontenis
%
The leaders of the "official" anarchist movement, still preoccupied with hiding the weaknesses and the inconsistencies, blurring the responsibility, avoiding the fundamental theoretical problems, avoid discussion or are satisfied with a few reluctant confessions and regrets.
		-- Georges Fontenis
%
The wise man knows that the words "The happiness of the people," have no meaning. Happiness is internal and individual. It can only be produced within oneself.
		-- Han Ryner
%
The wise man knows that the oppressed who complain aspire to be oppressors. He relieves them according to his means, but he doesn't believe in salvation through common action.
		-- Han Ryner
%
The wise man notes that reforms change the names of things and not the things themselves. The slave became a serf, and then a salaried worker: nothing has been reformed but language. The wise man remains indifferent to these questions of philology.
		-- Han Ryner
%
Experience proves to the wise man that revolutions never have lasting results. Reason tells him that lies are not refuted by lies, and that violence isn't destroyed by violence.
		-- Han Ryner
%
The anarchist believes that the government is the limit of liberty. He hopes, by destroying government, to expand liberty. The true limit is not government, but society. Government is a social product like another. We don't destroy a tree by cutting one of its branches.
		-- Han Ryner
%
Is work a social or a natural law? Work is a natural law worsened by society.
		-- Han Ryner
%
I have a good idea that will exempt you from relying on others while still finding food naturally. How? By practicing communism.
		-- He Zhen
%
What is the most important thing in the world? It is eating. Why do you women suffer mistreatment? It is relying on others in order to eat.
		-- He Zhen
%
What is "being an active agent?" It is women struggling for liberation with their own might. What is "being a passive agent?" It is men's granting liberation to women... what active forces there have been have come from men, and as a result the benefits to women have not equaled those garnered by men.
		-- He Zhen
%
What we mean by equality between the sexes is not just that men will no longer oppress women. We also want men to no longer be oppressed by other men and women no longer to be oppressed by other women.
		-- He Zhen
%
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
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That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.
		-- Henry David Thoreau
%
It is important not to confuse federalism as it is understood by the Paris Commune with the so-called federalism which exists in Switzerland and in the United States of America.
		-- James Guillaume
%
Federalism is above all the negation of the nation and the state.
		-- James Guillaume
%
Federalism is socialist, and for it solidarity is inseparable from liberty.
		-- James Guillaume
%
At the basis of Proudhon's economic theory we find two essential ideas, that of value and that of exchange. These two ideas are only of interest in the regime of individual property.
		-- James Guillaume
%
Proudhon was an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist communist, a federalist communist. Was he a communist without knowing it? No, he suspected it, and he said it, at least once.
		-- James Guillaume
%
No serious-minded man would venture to predict exactly how the Revolution, the indispensable condition for social renovation, will come about.
		-- James Guillaume
%
Without ecology, society cannot exist, and without humanity and nature, ecology cannot exist.
		-- Janet Biehl
%
The establishment of a citizens' assembly is not in itself a fulfillment; until its participating citizens develop radical content, it will be only an institutional structure.
		-- Janet Biehl
%
Nor can the nation-state and the capitalist system survive indefinitely. Not only is this system widening the divisions between rich and poor around the world into a yawning chasm, but it is also on a collision course with the biosphere.
		-- Janet Biehl
%
Human liberation and the protection of nonhuman life are not merely compatible -- both are necessary.
		-- Janet Biehl
%
The United States was born in a revolution, and some of its most revered Founding Fathers extolled the right to make one.
		-- Janet Biehl
%
If you wish to remain men, do not be soldiers; if you cannot stand humiliations do not don the uniform. If, however, you have already committed the imprudence of clothing yourselves therewith, and some day you find yourselves in the situation of being unable to control your indignation, then neither insult nor strike your superiors; LET DAYLIGHT THROUGH THEM! You will pay no more for it.
		-- Jean Grave
%
The most complete freedom for the individual, his right to full satisfaction of all his needs, are absolutely legitimate claims, and there was no need to go out to dig up Nietszche and Stirner to give them some consecration.
		-- Jean Grave
%
The man who would completely isolate himself from his fellow men, would return to the state of a brute animal, if the better armed species had not killed him before.
		-- Jean Grave
%
As you have undertaken to destroy these races, not inferior, but merely latecomer, you tend in like manner to destroy the working class, which you also qualify as inferior.
		-- Jean Grave
%
But though egoism or altruism, separately, each pushed to its extreme, is pernicious to the individual and society, united they are resolved into a third term, which is the law of future societies. This law is solidarity.
		-- Jean Grave
%
As man grows refined, he comes also to live not only for himself and in himself.
		-- Jean Grave
%
Those who would like to see society transformed without shocks must make up their minds to surrender the hope; it is impossible. Ideas in the course of evolving lead to revolution.
		-- Jean Grave
%
Anarchists are socialists because they want the improvement of society, and they are communists because they are convinced that such a transformation of society can only result from the establishment of a commonwealth of property.
		-- Johann Most
%
The god of the Christians, as we have seen, is the god who makes promises only to break them; who sends them pestilence and disease in order to heal them; a god who demoralizes mankind in order to improve it.
		-- Johann Most
%
He who negates present society, and seeks social conditions based on the sharing of property, is a revolutionary whether he calls himself an anarchist or a communist.
		-- Johann Most
%
We need do no more than repeat: only under communism does the individual become himself and lead his own life.
		-- Johann Most
%
Is anarchism desirable? Well, who does not seek freedom? What man, unless willing to declare himself in bondage, would care to call any control agreeable? Think about it!
		-- Johann Most
%
Whoever looks at America will see: the ship is powered by stupidity, corruption, or prejudice.
		-- Johann Most
%
If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.
		-- Johann Most
%
The existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion.
		-- Johann Most
%
Fortunately, no country was ever more suited for anarchist agitation than present-day America.
		-- Johann Most
%
As set forth by theologians, the idea of "God" is an argument that assumes its own conclusions, and proves nothing.
		-- Johann Most
%
It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell -- "voluntarily" sell -- himself every day and hour to the "beast of property."
		-- Johann Most
%
Is anarchism possible? The failure of attempts to attain freedom does not mean the cause is lost.
		-- Johann Most
%
They make revolutionary propaganda because they know the privileged class can never be overturned peacefully.
		-- Johann Most
%
"God" -- as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to.
		-- Johann Most
%
Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means -- speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point -- to accelerate revolutionary development.
		-- Johann Most
%
If we hope and even assume that the social question will be answered through communism, and not in this or that country but in the world, any thought of centralization must be a monstrosity.
		-- Johann Most
%
While we have entertained the contention that a deed may make more propaganda than hundreds of speeches, thousands of articles, and tens of thousands of pamphlets, we have held that an arbitrary act of violence will not necessarily have such an effect.
		-- Johann Most
%
Above all, what socialist, without flushing with shame, maintains he is not a revolutionary? We say: none!
		-- Johann Most
%
The aims of anarchists and true communists are identical.
		-- Johann Most
%
The anarchists, on behalf of the proletariat, therefore consider it necessary to show the proletariat that it will have to win a gigantic battle before it realizes its goals.
		-- Johann Most
%
Is anarchism possible? The failure of attempts to attain freedom does not mean the cause is lost.
		-- Johann Most
%
I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones.
		-- John Cage
%
Revolution can never stop.
		-- John Cage
%
We must do the impossible -- rid the world of nations, bringing the play of intelligent anarchy into a world environment.
		-- John Cage
%
We must make the world safe for poverty without dependence on government.
		-- John Cage
%
These revolutionaries, bare-necked politickers, have preserved with the imprint of the collar, the moral stain of servitude, the stiff neck of despotism.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
Dictatorship, whether it is a hydra with a hundred heads or a hundred tails, whether they are autocratic or demagogic, can certainly do nothing for liberty: it can only perpetuate slavery, morally and physically.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
All that which is not liberty is against liberty. Liberty is not a thing that can be allocated.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
Whoever calls himself revolutionary and speaks of dictatorship is only an imbecile or a traitor.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
A dictatorial committee composed of workers is certainly the thing one could find most inflated with self-importance and nullity and, consequently, the most anti-revolutionary.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
The emancipation of woman is nothing else than the emancipation of humanity -- both sexes.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
Emancipation or non-emancipation of woman, emancipation or non-emancipation of man -- what does it mean? Is it that by nature one has rights and the other has no rights?
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
It is not the product of their labors to which the workers have a right. It is the satisfaction of their needs, whatever the nature of those needs.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
What is a utopia? A dream unrealized, but not unrealizable.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
Man, according to the diverse conditions in which he moves, is more or less worthy or unworthy. The more he has a sense of his liberty, the more he also has a feeling of his dignity; the more respect he has for himself, and also for his fellows.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
Without doubt, conventional right, contract and law, even universally and directly exercised, is not natural right, or justice. It is a compromise between anarchy and authority, and everything that is not completely just is injustice.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
To weaken authority and criticize its acts is not enough. A negation, in order to be absolute, needs to complete itself with an affirmation. That is why I affirm liberty, why I deduce its consequences.
		-- Joseph Dejacque
%
There is no principle of anarchy that denies the right of free contract, and have I not a right to contract with others to live with them under the principles of communism?
		-- Joseph Labadie
%
Anarchy -- the sovereignty of the individual over his own actions -- is the goal for which we strive. Communism is one of those incidents that come afterwards.
		-- Joseph Labadie
%
In the first place, we are unequivocally opposed to the doctrine of total depravity. We hold that men are depraved only in so far as their surroundings make them so, and if those surroundings were removed, their depravity would disappear.
		-- Joseph Labadie
%
Are there any altruists who would go to hell in order that their neighbors should go to heaven? There is no hope of reward in hell, and a true altruist must expect no reward for his acts.
		-- Joseph Labadie
%
If the state would only remove those laws that stand in the way of free land, free money, and transportation, its other statutes would, in course of time, become useless and "repeal" themselves.
		-- Joseph Labadie
%
Poverty is the cause of crime, and the laws that stand in the way of free production and exchange are the cause of poverty.
		-- Joseph Labadie
%
The state, the society, the institutions, the body politic, the nation, the system, or customs we live in, must not be permitted to become primary, but must be secondary!
		-- Josiah Warren
%
The legitimate, the equitable compensation for the loan of money, is the cost of labor in lending it and receiving it back again.
		-- Josiah Warren
%
Governments involve the citizen in national and state responsibilities from which he would choose to be exempt; under these circumstances he can feel no security for person or property.
		-- Josiah Warren
%
Wars are, probably, the greatest of all destroyers of property, and they originate chiefly in two roots. First, for direct or indirect plunder; secondly, for the privileges of governing.
		-- Josiah Warren
%
If cost is made the limit of price, everyone becomes interested in reducing cost, by bringing in all the economies, all the facilities to their aid. But, on the contrary, if cost does not govern the price, but every thing is priced at what it will bring, there are no such cooperating interests.
		-- Josiah Warren
%
The equal exchange of labor would give as great a reward for honest and useful employments as for useless and fraudulent ones, and individual and unequivocal responsibilities (if for no other reasons) would induce a preference for the honest.
		-- Josiah Warren
%
All social arrangements should admit of this freedom of choice of every individual and all subordination should be voluntary.
		-- Josiah Warren
%
Infinite diversity instead of unity is inevitable, especially in the progressive or transitionary stage.
		-- Josiah Warren
%
What constitutes equity is the greatest question of all. It is the "unknown quantity" that even algebra has failed to furnish!
		-- Josiah Warren
%
Responsibility must be individual, or there is no responsibility at all.
		-- Josiah Warren
%
I am a famous man. My name has been trumpeted to the four corners of the globe. All those people who go through so much trouble to get others to talk about them, yet don't succeed, must be very jealous about the publicity that the press has given my humble self.
		-- Jules Bonnot
%
I am not appreciated in this society. I have the right to live, and while your imbecilic criminal society tries to stop me, well too bad for it, too bad for you!
		-- Jules Bonnot
%
I regretted Mathillet's death because he was a prole like us, a slave of bourgeois society. It was his gesture that was fatal.
		-- Jules Bonnot
%
We'll burn off our last round against the cops, and if they don't care to come, we'll certainly know how to find them.
		-- Jules Bonnot
%
Vulgar libertarian apologists... seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they're defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
The natural effect of unfettered market competition is socialism.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
As surprising as it might seem, there's a strong parallel between this free market vision of abundance and the Marxist vision of full communism.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
In a society where waste and planned obsolescence were no longer subsidized, and there were no barriers to competition socializing the full benefits of technological progress, we could probably enjoy our present quality of life with a fifteen-hour work week.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Capitalism -- a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor -- could not survive in a free market.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
We might mention the monumental hypocrisy of the regulation of credit unions in the United States, which require that their membership must share some common bond, like working for the same employer.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Abundant cheap credit would drastically alter the balance of power between capital and labor, and returns on labor would replace returns on capital as the dominant form of economic activity.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Free culture benefits consumers, it benefits artists, and it benefits the general culture. The only people who don't benefit are the parastic corporations of Big Content.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Any pretense of reducing the role of state in capitalism is a lie. It is impossible to smash the state without, as an immediate consequence, smashing capitalism along with it.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Government intervention in the market is the main source of large fortunes.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Right-libertarians aren't noted for siding with workers against employers, and right-to-work isn't an exception to the rule.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Eliminating the legal enforcement of DRM -- by criminal, mind, not civil law -- would effectively destroy all business models based on proprietary digital information.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
The outcome of this vote will, at best, slow down the rate at which the American government gravitates towards plutocracy, police statism and global corporate Empire.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
If you feel the need to vote in order to avert the immediate threat of fascism, by all means do so... in the meantime, we have a new society to build.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
No, Henry VIII could never have obtained an air conditioner or computer. But Henry VIII didn't spend half his month's income on rent, or live a single paycheck away from eviction.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
If you consider yourself a centrist, you're being played.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Rights have never been granted by authority. They have always been asserted against authority, and won from it.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Network executives, talk show hosts, and newspaper publishers and editors travel in the same social circle as the powerful state and corporate figures whom they're theoretically supposed to serve as watchdogs over.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
In other words, what Clinton wants is the opposite of free trade. She wants to keep the wealth of Africa in hands of the heirs and assigns of the same people who stole it, under colonialism.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Ever since FDR and Truman crafted the postwar order at the end of WWII, the central goal of U.S. security policy has been to globalize the economy, expand the volume of international trade and maintain institutional arrangements for propping up global corporate rule.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
The problem with the Confederates wasn't too little loyalty to the Union. It was too much loyalty -- to the Confederate states and the slave power they represented.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Actually inventing or producing things is at best the path to small-time wealth. The really big fortunes -- the billionaire kind -- instead come from controlling the circumstances under which other people are allowed to produce things.
		-- Kevin Carson
%
Fascism may be briefly described as the reluctant acquiescence of capitalists to governmental regimentation in order to stem the increasing impotency of a one-sided wealth accumulation to satisfy the needs of a country.
		-- Laurance Labadie
%
Ever since the advent of "Scientific Socialism" every attempt to better the conditions of mankind has been labelled "Utopian" by the followers of Karl Marx.
		-- Laurance Labadie
%
It is Marx's tortured truisms that give a plausibility to his works in their totality.
		-- Laurance Labadie
%
Between these two classes, and with the growth of manufacture and commerce, there arose an intermediate class whose affluence depended on personal ingenuity and ability, in whose attitude entered little of either the master or slave psychology but who clearly saw that their well-being depended on the freedom to exercise their abilities.
		-- Laurance Labadie
%
Anarchism will be seen to be an idealistic philosophy in the sense that it believes freedom will come from the conscious activity of men. No automatic process is to bring it about.
		-- Laurance Labadie
%
In short, progress is out of communism toward individualism, out of a condition of status to one of contract, out from authority toward liberty. But the "herd instinct" still remains.
		-- Laurance Labadie
%
The human animal is an animated alimentary canal. He has evolved from and differs from the worm only by the appendages which have developed on him.
		-- Laurance Labadie
%
How many times this must be proven in history before the libertarian believers in violent overthrow of the social order see the light is a deep and serious question. Some people never learn.
		-- Laurance Labadie
%
A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
One thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions -- the truth that for our life one law is valid -- the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
Armies are necessary, before all things, for the defense of governments from their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
We cannot pretend that we do not see the policeman who walks in front of the windows with a loaded revolver, defending us, while we eat our savory dinner or view a new performance, or those soldiers who will immediately go with their guns and loaded cartridges to where our property will be violated.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
As the uselessness and harmfulness of patriotism have become manifest, so also has increased the power of the government and ruling class to excite patriotism among the people.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
Anarchy will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
In our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
Wheresoever it be, there will exist the power of certain men over others, and there will not be freedom, but there will be the oppression of one portion of mankind by another. Therefore power must be abolished.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
If power is to be abolished it must be abolished not by force but by men's consciousness of its uselessness and evil.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
Power has become invincible, and rests no longer on the higher national foundations of anointed right, election, or representation, but on violence alone.
		-- Leo Tolstoy
%
Bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation.
		-- Leopold Kohr
%
Even if a single United Nations World State would come into existence, it would solve nothing. It would still be composed of the reduced number of state organisms crystallizing around the remaining great powers.
		-- Leopold Kohr
%
In the Middle Ages, there was war in some corner of Europe almost every day. But they were little wars with little effects because the powers waging them were little and their resources small.
		-- Leopold Kohr
%
The fact that modern wars are fewer in number can hardly be considered a praiseworthy contribution to peace if we take into account the misery they spread from one end of the world to the other.
		-- Leopold Kohr
%
Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a certain size, everything collapses or explodes.
		-- Leopold Kohr
%
The majority can hardly accept the existence of anything but the two extremes: masters and slaves.
		-- Lev Chernyi
%
Not all those who are considered anarchists are pure anarchists. Tolstoy and Kropotkin have to be thrown out, having very little anarchy in their systems. They are anarchists only in the political sphere, and in all other relations between people they remain ardent communists.
		-- Lev Chernyi
%
The internationalism of socialists is just an empty phrase.
		-- Lev Chernyi
%
In anarchy the Russian, Finn, Jew, Georgian, and Ukrainian are not enemies, but comrades. In short, there is only one conclusion: anarchy inevitably leads to internationalism.
		-- Lev Chernyi
%
Nobody scolded or hated capitalism more than him, but the subtle mind of Proudhon saw the vileness of communism.
		-- Lev Chernyi
%
No one who knew that the flag consisted of a bit of black stuff on the end of a broomstick would believe it, and no more do you, sir. I wished to show that the laborers were dying of hunger and in need of work. It is the flag of strikes and famines.
		-- Louise Michel
%
We love to have agents provocateurs in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions.
		-- Louise Michel
%
Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance.
		-- Louise Michel
%
The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.
		-- Louise Michel
%
Today, go blossom in the shadow of the dark and sad prisons. Go, bloom near the somber captive, and tell them truly that we love them. Tell them that through fleeting time, everything belongs to the future, that the livid conqueror can die more surely than the conquered.
		-- Louise Michel
%
Power is cursed, that is why I am an anarchist.
		-- Louise Michel
%
It is not a crumb of bread, but the harvest of the entire world that the human race needs, without exploiters and without exploited.
		-- Louise Michel
%
Without the rule of one, there would be light, there would be truth, there would be justice. The rule of one is a crime.
		-- Louise Michel
%
The task of teachers, those obscure soldiers of civilization, is to give to the people the intellectual means to revolt.
		-- Louise Michel
%
Each seeks his way, we seek ours and think the day that freedom and equality reign, mankind will be happy.
		-- Louise Michel
%
I repeat that I am a political prisoner. The prosecution, whatever the attorney general may say, is political and nothing else.
		-- Louise Michel
%
What I want is the revolution, which will cause poverty to disappear. I hail the revolution, which is inevitable, and I hope that it will come soon to bring liberty and equality to the suffering.
		-- Louise Michel
%
Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
The philosophy of anarchism is included in the word "Liberty"; yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else that are conducive to progress.
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
Most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty.
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
We cannot help but believe that were every law, every title deed, every court, and every police officer or soldier abolished tomorrow with one sweep, we would be better off than now.
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
Anarchism is the usher of science -- the master of ceremonies to all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development.
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
To my mind, the struggle for liberty is too great and the few steps we have gained have been won at too great a sacrifice, for the great mass of the people of this 20th century to consent to turn over to any political party the management of our social and industrial affairs.
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination.
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
Each of you hungry tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land. Learn the use of explosives!
		-- Lucy Parsons
%
If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money, as minorities; and are liable and likely to be equally -- perhaps more than equally, because more boldly -- rapacious, tyrannical and unprincipled, if intrusted with power. There is no more reason, then, why a man should either sustain, or submit to, the rule of the majority, than of a minority.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
If there be in nature such a principle as justice, it is necessarily the only political principle there ever was, or ever will be.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
The true and legitimate meaning of the word treason, then, necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith. Without these, there can be no treason.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
In vices, the very essence of crime -- that is, the design to injure the person or property of another -- is wanting.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
A government that shall punish all vices impartially is so obviously an impossibility, that nobody was ever found, or ever will be found, foolish enough to propose it.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
The right of revolution, which tyrants, in mockery, accord to mankind, is no legal right under a government; it is only a natural right to overturn a governmentent. The government itself never acknowledges this right.
		-- Lysander Spooner
%
It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism.
		-- Malcolm X
%
They call me "a teacher, a fomenter of violence." I would say point blank, "That is a lie. I'm not for wanton violence, I'm for justice."
		-- Malcolm X
%
"Malcolm X advocates armed Negroes!" What was wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong. I was a black man talking about physical defense against the white man. The white man can lynch and burn and bomb and beat Negroes -- that's all right: "Have patience" ... "The customs are entrenched" ... "Things will get better."
		-- Malcolm X
%
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
		-- Malcolm X
%
The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.
		-- Malcolm X
%
You can't separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
		-- Malcolm X
%
We are in a society where the power is in the hands of those who are the worst breed of humanity.
		-- Malcolm X
%
If it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.
		-- Malcolm X
%
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
		-- Malcolm X
%
Usually, when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
		-- Malcolm X
%
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression.
		-- Malcolm X
%
Power never takes a back step -- only in the face of more power.
		-- Malcolm X
%
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.
		-- Malcolm X
%
We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary.
		-- Malcolm X
%
Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.
		-- Malcolm X
%
I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.
		-- Malcolm X
%
I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
		-- Malcolm X
%
There are socialists all over the world, by the millions; but where is socialism... political socialism is politics without socialism, and nothing else.
		-- Mario Ferreira dos Santos
%
Many people know that it is difficult to define socialism, due to the great heterogeneity of schools and systems. But common to all schools is the desire to improve the conditions of all men and to remove all obstacles that prevent this improvement and everything that facilitates the exploitation of man by man.
		-- Mario Ferreira dos Santos
%
The fight against the destruction of surplus product and against hoarding in Brazil cannot be carried out through the state, but through consumer cooperatives, which affiliated with powerful federations, will be able to deliver to the market and finance production and regulate prices on a fair basis.
		-- Mario Ferreira dos Santos
%
History shows us that the most beneficial works, which were most effective in achieving their beneficial purposes, were precisely those that were directly managed.
		-- Mario Ferreira dos Santos
%
The keeping of power is followed by certain benefits that incite the ambition of many who look at it as an end rather than a means, and aspire power to enjoy it.
		-- Mario Ferreira dos Santos
%
In all times, the proletarian was only able to rise above his poverty when -- through his own efforts combined with his brothers' -- he himself created his own wealth.
		-- Mario Ferreira dos Santos
%
Direct democracy is a proven practice among peoples of high culture.
		-- Mario Ferreira dos Santos
%
Theft is the restitution, the regaining of possession. Instead of being cloistered in a factory, like in a penal colony; instead of begging for what I had a right to, I preferred to rebel and fight my enemy face to face by making war on the rich, by attacking their goods.
		-- Marius Jacob
%
Very young, the virus of justice was inoculated to me and it earned me many a trouble.
		-- Marius Jacob
%
In order to destroy an effect you must first destroy the cause. If there is theft it is only because there is abundance on one hand and famine on the other; because everything only belongs to some. The struggle will only disappear when men will put their joys and suffering in common, their labors and their riches, when all will belong to everyone.
		-- Marius Jacob
%
Those who produce everything have nothing, and those who produce nothing have everything. Such a state of affairs can only produce antagonism between the laboring class and the owning, i.e., do-nothing, class. The fight breaks out and hatred delivers its blows.
		-- Marius Jacob
%
Freedom must be so extensive that it includes the right not to be free.
		-- Max Nettlau
%
Do I want to propose my own system? Not at all! I am an advocate of all systems.
		-- Max Nettlau
%
Indeed, in many cases, maliciousness and stupidity will put many obstacles in the road of the new idea. That is the reason why hard struggles must be fought for unconditional mutual tolerance, until it is finally achieved. Only from then on will everything proceed automatically, science will bloom and advance, because the necessary foundation for every progress, namely experimental freedom and free research have been achieved.
		-- Max Nettlau
%
While governments are subjected to the principle of free experimentation, to free competition, they will improve and perfect themselves on their own. No more aloofness, up in the clouds, which only hides their emptiness. Success for them will entirely depend upon them doing it better and cheaper than the others do.
		-- Max Nettlau
%
For a long time I have been fascinated by the thought how wonderful it would be if at last, in public opinion on the succession of political and social institutions, the fateful term "one after another" would be replaced through the very simple and self-evident "simultaneously."
		-- Max Nettlau
%
Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap.
		-- Max Stirner
%
What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.
		-- Max Stirner
%
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?
		-- Max Stirner
%
The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine.
		-- Max Stirner
%
The only thing I am not entitled to is what I do not do with a free cheer, that is, that I do not entitle myself to.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Every state is a despotism.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Freedom can only be the whole of freedom; a piece of freedom is not freedom.
		-- Max Stirner
%
The poor are to blame for there being rich men.
		-- Max Stirner
%
He who has might has right... is this wisdom so hard to attain?
		-- Max Stirner
%
The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves.
		-- Max Stirner
%
What you have the power to be you have the right to be.
		-- Max Stirner
%
The state always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual -- to make him subject to some generality or other.
		-- Max Stirner
%
God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing, for nothing but themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one.
		-- Max Stirner
%
To be looked upon as a mere part, part of society, the individual cannot bear -- because he is more; his uniqueness puts from it this limited conception.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new "supreme being," which "takes us into its service and allegiance!"
		-- Max Stirner
%
It is not another state that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing.
		-- Max Stirner
%
The state behaves as the same ruler that the church was. The latter rests on godliness, the former on morality.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Why, liberty of the press is only permission of the press, and the state never will or can voluntarily permit me to grind it to nothingness by the press.
		-- Max Stirner
%
The "equality of right" is a phantom just because right is nothing more and nothing less than admission, a matter of grace.
		-- Max Stirner
%
I am unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind.
		-- Max Stirner
%
That the communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side of communism... If you were a "lazy-bones," he would not indeed fail to recognize the man in you, but would endeavour to cleanse him as a "lazy man" from laziness and to convert you to the faith that labor is man's "destiny and calling."
		-- Max Stirner
%
The republic is nothing whatever but absolute monarchy; for it makes no difference whether the monarch is called prince or people, both being a "majesty."
		-- Max Stirner
%
In a republic, all are lords, that is, all despotize one over another.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively: not to every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest... he who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, "conscience," watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a "matter of conscience," that is, police business.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my conscience.
		-- Max Stirner
%
The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!
		-- Max Stirner
%
A fist full of might goes farther than a bag full of rights.
		-- Max Stirner
%
Freedom, the realization of freedom: who can deny that this is what today heads the agenda of history?
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
We must not only act politically, but in our politics act religiously, religiously in the sense of freedom, of which the one true expression is justice and love.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men... if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Political freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
If there is a state, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The state without slavery is unthinkable -- and this is why we are the enemies of the state.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The peoples' revolution will arrange its revolutionary organization from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The state, therefore, is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
This flagrant negation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of the state is, from the standpoint of the state, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Since the birth of the state, the world of politics has always been and continues to be the stage for unlimited rascality and brigandage.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "for reasons of state."
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
In a republic, there are at least brief periods when the people, while continually exploited, is not oppressed; in the monarchies, oppression is constant.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
While we prefer the republic, we must recognise and proclaim that whatever the form of government may be, so long as human society continues to be divided into different classes as a result of the hereditary inequality of occupations, of wealth, of education, and of rights, there will always be a class-restricted government and the inevitable exploitation of the majorities by the minorities.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The state is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well regulated and systematised.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The second element of freedom is negative. It is the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective, and individual authority.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
I hate communism because it is the negation of liberty and because for me humanity is unthinkable without liberty. I am not a communist, because communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the state all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the state.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Is it not plain that all these governments are systematic poisoners, interested stupefiers of the masses?
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
The oppression of one is the oppression of all, and we cannot violate the liberty of one being without violating the freedom of all of us.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
Anarchism is "stateless socialism."
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
"Class", "power", "state", are three inseparable terms, one of which presupposes the other two.
		-- Mikhail Bakunin
%
At the same time, of course, Marxism arose -- Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism -- and art became political.
		-- Douglas Sirk
%
The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.
		-- James Larkin
%
Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country's misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck.
		-- Ba Jin
%
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
		-- Virginia Woolf
%
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
		-- Tacitus
%
In our so very civilized society it is necessary for me to live the life of a savage. I must be free, even of governments.
		-- Gustave Courbet
%
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
		-- Voltaire
%
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
		-- Voltaire
%
I desire neither to rule nor to be ruled.
		-- Otanes
%
Whoever denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist.
		-- Sebastien Faure
%
Anarchy is order; government is civil war.
		-- Anselme Bellagarrigue
%
Up to now you have believed in the existence of tyrants. Well, you were mistaken. There are only slaves. Where none obeys, none commands.
		-- Anselme Bellagarrigue
%
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
		-- Lord Acton
%
No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep.
		-- Carl Jung
%
Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women.
		-- Victoria Woodhull
%
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
		-- Albert Einstein
%
An unjust law is no law at all.
		-- Augustine of Hippo
%
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
		-- Louis Blanc
%
The world does not need governing; in fact it should not be governed.
		-- Zhuangzi
%
Order results spontaneously when things are let alone.
		-- Zhuangzi
%
Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor" -- infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
		-- Wendell Phillips
%
I am not a political man and I have no political convictions. I am an individual and a believer in liberty. That is all the politics I have.
		-- Charlie Chaplin
%
I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can't stand caged animals. People must be free.
		-- Charlie Chaplin
%
Anarchism is an ethic, it's a way of behaving.
		-- Henri Cartier-Bresson
%
In a world that is buckling under the weight of profit making, that is overrun by the destructive sirens of Techno-science and the power hunger of globalization -- that new brand of slavery -- beyond all that, friendship exists, love exists.
		-- Henri Cartier-Bresson
%
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
		-- Herbert Marcuse
%
Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity.
		-- Herbert Marcuse
%
A philosopher is dead when he is no longer read. Some, then, know the strange fortune of death while still alive.
		-- Michel Onfray
%
Who cares about the victim if the gesture is beautiful?
		-- Laurent Tailhade
%
Can one live without working? We can only live without working.
		-- Raoul Vaneigem
%
Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?
		-- Raoul Vaneigem
%
There is no such thing as a good usage or a bad usage of the freedom of speech, only an insufficient usage.
		-- Raoul Vaneigem
%
Faith can move mountains but let them happily fall down on the heads of other people.
		-- Boris Vian
%
Remove the conditional and you destroy God.
		-- Boris Vian
%
Our comrades had not read Marx and were scarcely familiar with all of Proudhon's theories, but common sense was their guide.
		-- Gaston Leval
%
If crimes are committed they must be seen as a disease, and punishment as treatment rather than as social vengeance.
		-- Daniel Guerin
%
Far from checking the spread of immorality, repression has always extended and deepended it. Thus it is futile to oppose it by rigorous legislation which trespasses on individual liberty.
		-- Daniel Guerin
%
Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes -- the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
		-- Howard Zinn
%
Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.
		-- John Lindsay
%
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
		-- Frederick Douglass
%
The common land is my own land equal with my fellow commoners, and our true propriety by the Law of Creation: it is every one's, but not one single one's.
		-- Gerrard Winstanley
%
The clergy will serve on any side, like our ancient laws that will serve any master.
		-- Gerrard Winstanley
%
England is a prison. The variety of subtleties in the laws preserved by the sword are bolts, bars, and doors of the prison; the lawyers are the jailors; and poor men are the prisoners.
		-- Gerrard Winstanley
%
Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.
		-- Susan B. Anthony
%
Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.
		-- Susan B. Anthony
%
To consider mankind otherwise than brethren, to think favors are peculiar to one nation and exclude others, plainly supposes a darkness in the understanding.
		-- John Woolman
%
The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.
		-- J. R. R. Tolkien
%
I attacked the king because in my opinion he is responsible for all the pale and bleeding victims of the system that he represents and has to defend.
		-- Gaetano Bresci
%
I'm sure I was not wrong to do what I did. I do not even intend to appeal. I appeal only to the next proletarian revolution.
		-- Gaetano Bresci
%
I have not shot Umberto. I have killed a king, I have killed a principle.
		-- Gaetano Bresci
%
I would have been a coward if I hadn't had the courage to express, in my own way, my rancour and my disgust.
		-- Germaine Berton
%
I am not insensitive, and I had to overcome great reluctance before killing a human being, even my enemy.
		-- Germaine Berton
%
However, in no way do I regret the act I committed and my conscience feels no remorse. Because, in killing the leader of the King's Camelots, I only obeyed my heart, torn by the suffering of all unfortunate proletarians, hounded and enslaved pariahs.
		-- Germaine Berton
%
Voting strongly resembles the capitalist economic system that always accompanies democracy.
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
The concept of the "majority" is particularly troubling. By always accepting the will of the majority, democracy allows for majorities to have an absolute tyranny over everyone else.
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
By providing the illusion of participation for everyone, democracy allows majorities to justify their actions, no matter how oppressive.
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
If the federal government can't even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
If the federal government had access to every email you've ever written and every phone call you've ever made, it's almost certain that they could find something you've done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don't know it yet.
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
We can only desire based on what we know. It is our present experience of what we are and are not able to do that largely determines our sense for what is possible.
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
Those maintaining positions of power will always encourage the freedom to talk about ideas, but never to act.
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
Even if you believe that voting is more than a selection of meaningless choices designed to mask the true lack of agency we have, there is a tremendous amount of money and power and influence on the other side of this equation. So don't just vote or petition.
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
I actually think that law enforcement should be difficult, and I think it should actually be possible to break the law.
		-- Moxie Marlinspike
%
The great majority of people have to work in order to earn a livelihood, and a sizable proportion of them are productive workers. A huge number of workers are unproductive as well. They operate entirely with the circumstances and framework created by the capitalist system, such as shuffling invoices, contracts, credit slips, insurance policies, and so forth. Probably nine out of ten "workers" wouldn't have any work to do in a rational society -- one that would not require insurance or any other commercial transactions.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
Our being is becoming, not stasis. Our science is utopia, our reality is eros, our desire is revolution.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
I believe in individual freedom; that's my primary and complete commitment -- individual liberty. That's what it's all about. And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
As a credo, individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ("free love") and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
When lifestyle anarchists call for autonomy rather than freedom, they thereby forfeit the rich social connotations of freedom.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
Ironically, the world idealized by primitivists would actually preclude the radical individualism celebrated by the individualist heirs of Max Stirner.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
The sovereign, self-sufficient "individual" has always been a precarious basis upon which to anchor a left libertarian outlook.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
Certainly, it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other phenomena -- such as technology or population growth -- for growing environmental dislocations.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
The idea of dominating nature has a history that is almost as old as that of hierarchy itself.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual persuasion and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary; they are necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism is structurally amoral and hence impervious to moral appeals.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
Like it or not, the future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
The conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
What underpins every social conflict in the United States today is the demand for the realization of all human potentialities in a fully rounded, balanced, totalistic way of life.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical size, scale, and even artistry deflects our attention away from the most significant problems of technics -- notably, its ties with the ideals and social structures of freedom.
		-- Murray Bookchin
%
Collective responsibility in revolutionary action... is a fundamental principle, which guides each one of us in our way of understanding the anarchist idea, in our determination that it should penetrate to the masses, in its spirit of sacrifice.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
It is through the inspiration of collective responsibility that the revolutionaries of all epochs and all schools have united their forces; it is upon this that they based their hope that their partial revolts -- revolts which opened the path for the oppressed -- were not in vain, that the exploited would understand their aspirations, would extract from them the applications suitable for the time and would use them to find new paths toward their emancipation.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
Anarchism does not depend on theory or programs, which try to grasp man's life in its entirety. It is a teaching, which is based on real life, which outgrows all artificial limitations, which cannot be constricted by any system.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
Anarchism is a part of human nature, communism its logical extension.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
There are even moments when the authority of the socialists and communists is worse than the bourgeois, for they tear down their own ideas and trample on them.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
Anarchism is not merely a doctrine that treats of man's social life, in the narrow meaning with which the term is invested in political dictionaries, and sometimes, at meetings, by our propagandist speakers. It is also a teaching that embraces the whole existence of man as a rounded individual.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
"Soviet" power is a power no better and no worse than any other.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
It has come to pass in history that the workers have defeated capitalism, but the victory then slipped from their grasp, because some state power emerged, amalgamating the interests of private capitalism and those of state capitalism for the sake of success over the toilers.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
Whether individually or as a countless mass, man finds himself at the mercy of this band of drones going under the name of "governors and masters," when in reality they are nothing but straightforward exploiters and oppressors.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
According to their absurd programs, the statist socialists and communists have decided to "allow" man to emancipate himself socially, without its thereby being feasible for him to manifest that freedom in his social life.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
Only the man who has successfully rid himself of the chains of oppression and seen all the horrors being perpetrated against the human race can be persuaded that his freedom and that of his neighbor are inviolable, as are their lives, and that his neighbor is his brother.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
Liberalism, socialism and state communism are three branches of the same family, resorting to different approaches in order to exercise their power over man.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
The power of the state will never deliver joy, happiness and fulfillment to any society. Such power was created by drones for the sole purpose of pillage and indulgence of their often murderous violence against those who do produce, through their toil -- whether through determination, intelligence or brawn -- everything useful and good in man's life.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
There is no such thing as harmless power.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
Oppressed brother, banish all power from within you and do not allow any to be established either over you or over your brother, be he near or far!
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
The really wholesome, joyous life of the individual or group is not built up with the aid of power and programs that seek to enclose it within artificial constructs and written laws.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
The sworn enemy of your emancipation is the state: it is best embodied by the union of these five stereotypes: the property-owner, the soldier, the judge, the priest and the one who serves them all, the intellectual.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
The enemy is very strong because, for centuries past, he has made his living from theft and violence: he has the accumulated experience of that, he has overcome internal crises and now he puts on a new face.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
The lunacy of the Soviet regime must be eliminated and replaced by the vital principles of the exploited workers, on a basis of solidarity, freedom and equal voice for each and every person.
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
The fact that the modern state is the organizational form of an authority founded upon arbitrariness and violence in the social life of toilers is independent of whether it may be "bourgeois" or "proletarian."
		-- Nestor Makhno
%
The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
Fate and freedom alike play a part in history; and there are times, as in wars and revolutions, when fate is the stronger of the two.
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth.
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality.
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
What one needs to do at every moment of one's life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world.
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
Spirit, like flame, like freedom, like creativeness, is opposed to any social stagnation or any lifeless tradition.
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realization. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realization?
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
The whole economic system of capitalism is an offshoot of a devouring and overwhelming lust, of a kind that can hold sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced the Christian asceticism and turned away from heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications.
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
Almost all contemporary political ideologies, with their characteristic tendency to state-idolatry, are likewise largely a product of two world wars, begotten as they are of the inexorability's of fate.
		-- Nikolai Berdyaev
%
That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
I mean, "chaos" is a meaning of the word, but it's not a meaning that has any relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant "chaos" -- in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that's organized democratically from below.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
It makes a lot of sense, if you accept capitalist system, to try to accumulate property, not just because you want material welfare, but because that guarantees your freedom.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
The Cold War serves as a useful device for the managers of American society and their counterparts in the Soviet Union to control their own populations and their own respective imperial systems.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
A corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Where the state lacks means of coercion, it is important to control what people think.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion --  minimal respect for facts and logic -- has been virtually abandoned.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
States are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism than the rest of the world combined and, therefore, in the American ideological system it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as Orwell would have predicted.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
As early as World War I, American historians offered themselves to President Woodrow Wilson to carry out a task they called "historical engineering," by which they meant designing the facts of history so that they would serve state police.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
If the United States was conquered by the Russians, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Elliott Abrams and the rest of them would probably be working for the invaders, sending people off to concentration camps. They're the right personality types.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Of course it's extremely easy to say, "The heck with it. I'm just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can within them." Sure, you can do that. But that's not acting like a decent person.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba is stable, but that's not called stability.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
The Ottoman Empire was an ugly affair, but they had the right idea. The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much -- were mostly interested in robbing them -- and they left them alone to run their own affairs, and their own regions and their own communities with a lot of local self determination.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a "war against terrorism."
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous. He's a dangerous radical.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
I consider it immoral to be a supporter of a power system.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are anarchists.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
There are differences in the parties -- I don't think they're great differences, but they're real, and small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people's minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by and for the people.
		-- Noam Chomsky
%
During humankind's long centuries societies have risen and fallen, all alike in this one fact which rules all history: the great are protected, the small are crushed.
		-- Octave Mirbeau
%
The greatest danger of bombs is in the explosion of stupidity that they provoke.
		-- Octave Mirbeau
%
Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.
		-- Octave Mirbeau
%
To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business.
		-- Octave Mirbeau
%
Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Charity creates a multitude of sins.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercize such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Private property has crushed true individualism, and set up an individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Wherever there is a man who exercizes authority, there is a man who resists authority.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
"Know thyself" was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, "Be thyself" shall be written.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercize it, and degrades those over whom it is exercized.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
The one thing that the public dislike is novelty.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
It is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
All the results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
In America, the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Patriotism is the vice of nations.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
Only the shallow know themselves.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
One should always be a little improbable.
		-- Oscar Wilde
%
There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called "anarchist." It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite.
		-- Paul Goodman
%
In this country, where we have no continuing anarchist tradition, the young hardly know their tendency at all.
		-- Paul Goodman
%
In the United States, the New Left has agreed to regard itself as Marxist and speaks of seizing power and building socialism, although it is strongly opposed to centralized power and it has no economic theory whatever for a society and technology like ours.
		-- Paul Goodman
%
The protesting students are anarchist because they are in a historical situation to which anarchism is their only possible response.
		-- Paul Goodman
%
Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
There has not been one revolution in the world's history which was carried out by the working people in their own interests -- by urban workers and poor peasants who do not exploit the work of others.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
Anarchism embraces two worlds: the world of philosophy, of ideas, and the world of practice, of activity. The two are intimately linked.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
The anarchist ideal is large and rich in its diversity. Nevertheless, the role of anarchists in the social struggle of the masses is extremely modest. Their task is to help the masses take the right road in the struggle and in the construction of the new society.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
The Communist power installed itself by military force, not only when the Bolsheviks occupied a place after a battle to drive out the Petliurists, but also in places where the region was already free and the peasants were on their own.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
The Makhnovist movement was founded on the deep feeling of fraternity which characterizes only the most oppressed. During its entire history it did not for an instant appeal to national sentiments.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
The conditions of contemporary life encircle the workers on all sides, surround them, like water surrounds fish in the sea. The workers are not able to escape from these conditions.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
Disorganization is the twin sister of irresponsibility, and together they lead to impoverished ideas and futile practice.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
Anarchism is not mysticism; it is not a discourse on beauty; it is not a cry of despair.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
The Bolshevik practice of the last ten years shows clearly the counter-revolutionary role of their dictatorship of the Party.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
We do not doubt that, if the revolution broke out in several European countries, anarchists would suffer the same defeat because they are no less -- if not even more so -- divided on the plan of ideas and organization.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
It is obvious that in calling on anarchists to organise on the basis of a definite program, we are not taking away as such the right of anarchists of other tendencies to organise as they think fit.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
Always and everywhere among us, practical problems have been resolved by a majority of votes.
		-- Peter Arshinov
%
America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
The peoples of the world are becoming profoundly dissatisfied and are not appeased by the promise of the social democrats to patch up the state into a new engine of oppression.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
The word "state" is identical with the word "war."
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
A structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of explosives.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Freedoms are not given, they are taken.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
One courageous act has sufficed to upset in a few days the entire governmental machinery, to make the colossus tremble.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
In existing states a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Instead of inanely repeating the old formula, "Respect the law," we say, "Despise law and all its attributes!"
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
In place of the cowardly phrase, "Obey the law," our cry is "Revolt against all laws!"
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
The individual is quite a world of federations, a whole universe in himself.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by capital and state.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Governmental communism, like theocratic communism, is repugnant to the worker.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
It is above all over the question of the state that socialists are divided.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
The state idea means something quite different from the idea of government.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
The Roman Empire was a state in the real sense of the word. To this day it remains the legist's ideal.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
It is a sad sight to see those who believe themselves to be revolutionaries unleashing their hatred on the anarchist.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
It is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual aid principle appears in full.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
It is often said that anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
Have not prisons -- which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe -- always been universities of crime? Is not the court of a tribunal a school of ferocity?
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.
		-- Peter Kropotkin
%
To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
All my political ideas boil down to this formula: political federation or decentralization.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth!
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
What is property? It is robbery!
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Philosophy will not change the course of events: destiny will fulfill itself regardless of prophecy. Besides, must not justice be done and our education be finished?
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
We had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Yes: all men believe and repeat that equality of conditions is identical with equality of rights; that property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded, or rather usurped, in the name of superior talent or service, is iniquity and extortion. All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
They will die of hunger at the proprietor's door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, "So perish idlers and vagrants!"
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Property is impossible.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Fear of the people is the defect of all those who belong to authority. The people, as concerns power, is the enemy.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Liberty is not daughter of order but mother of order.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Whosoever lays a hand on me in order to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant; I declare him my enemy.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
What do I, a proletarian, care for the tranquility and security of the rich? I care as little for public order as for the proprietor's safety. I ask to live a laborer; otherwise I will die a warrior.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Louis Blanc has gone so far as to reverse the republic motto, as if he wanted to revolutionize the revolution. He no longer says, as everybody else says, and according to tradition, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; he says Equality, Fraternity, Liberty!
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
Equality! I had always thought that it was the natural fruit of Liberty, which has no need of theory nor of constraint.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
We should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in brief, a contradiction.
		-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
%
In creating the articles of the Criminal Code, the legislators forgot that they didn't attack the causes, but only the effects, and so they don't in any way destroy crime. In truth, the causes continuing to exist, the effects will necessarily flow from them. There will always be criminals, for today you destroy one, but tomorrow ten will be born.
		-- Ravachol
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It is society that makes criminals and you, jury members, instead of striking you should use your intelligence and your strength to transform society. In one fell swoop you'll suppress all crime. And your work, in attacking causes, will be greater and more fruitful than your justice, which belittles itself in punishing its effects.
		-- Ravachol
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While judging me judge all the unfortunate who poverty, combined with natural pride, made criminals, and who wealth or ease would have made honest men. An intelligent society would have made of them men like any other!
		-- Ravachol
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Anarchy is the obliteration of property.
		-- Ravachol
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Masters aren't necessary, these people whose idleness is maintained by our labor; everyone must make himself useful to society, by which I mean work according to his ability and his aptitude.
		-- Ravachol
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Today the anarchists are numerous enough to overthrow the current state of things, and if that hasn't yet happened, it's because we must complete the education of the followers, give birth in them to the energy and the firm will to assist in the realization of their projects.
		-- Ravachol
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I -- anarchist and individualist -- don't want to and cannot embrace the cause of atheist communism, because I dont believe in the supreme elevation of the masses and therefore I refuse the realization of Anarchy understood as a social form of human life together.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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The anarchist is the one who refuses every cause for the joy of his life radiating from inner spiritual intensity.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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No future and no humanity, no communism and no anarchy is worthy of the sacrifice of my life.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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The revolt of the individual against society is not given by that of the masses against governments.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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All past revolutions were in the end, bourgeois and conservative.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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I am an individualist because I am an anarchist; and I am an anarchist because I am a nihilist.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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I despise humanity because it is not my humanity. I hate tyrants and I detest slaves.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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Plebeian and bourgeois are equivalent. They deserve each other.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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We need to return to heroic anarchism, to individual, violent, reckless, poetic, decentering audacity...
		-- Renzo Novatore
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The life that society offers us is not a full, free and joyful life. It is a crushed, mutilated, humiliated life. We must refuse it.
		-- Renzo Novatore
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No, there is no need to fear life without government; we long for it with all of our hearts.
		-- Ricardo Flores Magon
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The Mexican people hate, by instinct, authority and the bourgeoisie.
		-- Ricardo Flores Magon
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As regards the mestizo population [of mixed Indian and Spanish heritage], which is the majority of the people of Mexico -- with the exception of those who inhabited the great cities and large towns -- they held the forests, lands, and bodies of water in common, just as the indigenous peoples did.
		-- Ricardo Flores Magon
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Our authority is our own conscience. She is the one that pushes us, she is our spur. We are slaves, but to our duty.
		-- Ricardo Flores Magon
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It is the duty of us poor people to work and struggle to break the chains that make us slaves.
		-- Ricardo Flores Magon
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All that's left to be done is that the workers take possession of the factory, the workshop, the mine, the foundry, the railroad, the ship, in a word, everything -- that they recognize no bosses of any type.
		-- Ricardo Flores Magon
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To analyze ownership, such as it is now constituted, is a chore little more than superfluous. Its justification has yet to be formulated; nobody has ventured to defend it as anything more than something necessary.
		-- Ricardo Mella
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Freedom, we want nothing more than freedom, since what freedom does not do, not one institution whatsoever will be able to make possible.
		-- Ricardo Mella
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Whoever has not emancipated himself will be left behind with the current movement and will seek redemption in vain. He will die a slave.
		-- Ricardo Mella
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Anarchic socialism and the revolutionary spirit still survive in Spain; they will do their work and the solidarity of the other nations will not fail us.
		-- Ricardo Mella
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Apart from the individualist faction, we are all socialist anarchists and all in favor of community. I say all, because collectivism, as the Spanish anarchists understand it, is only a degree of the community of which, in their turn, those who call themselves communists do not reject a single word.
		-- Ricardo Mella
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The struggles of doctrinal exclusivism languish at present. My desire is to have contributed to making them disappear entirely.
		-- Ricardo Mella
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Anarchist communism in Spain differs from collectivism in that it denies all organization for the present and for the future.
		-- Ricardo Mella
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Ultimately, anarchist collectivism aspires to the spontaneous organization of society by means of free agreement, without asserting processes, or a necessary result.
		-- Ricardo Mella
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If you list almost all of the assassinations that have been attributed to anarchists and assume that all of them were performed by anarchists (which is a dubious assumption by the way -- many of them were police frame-ups), but on that assumption it still turns out that more anarchists have been murdered by governments than all that can be accused of having murdered governors.
		-- Robert Anton Wilson
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One could wager, considering the number of anarchists when Franco took over, probably a considerable portion of the Spanish population are still anarchists. And if they could get out from under the Franco dictatorship they could attempt to implement anarchism once again.
		-- Robert Anton Wilson
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[Warren and Proudhon's idea] originated independently, just as like Leibniz and Newton invented the calculus, or Darwin and Wallace invented the theory of evolution simultaneously, Warren and Proudhon devoted a great deal of energy to the mutual banking idea.
		-- Robert Anton Wilson
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Cybernetics is going to drive the whole world to decentralization which is what the anarchists have always urged. -- Robert Anton Wilson
		-- Robert Anton Wilson
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Well I sometimes call myself a libertarian but that's only because most people don't know what anarchist means. Most people hear you're an anarchist and they think you're getting ready to throw a bomb at a building.
		-- Robert Anton Wilson
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I think government should be treated like religion, everyone should be able to pick the kind they like. Only it should be contractual not obligatory.
		-- Robert Anton Wilson
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Nothing wrong with communist anarchism as long as it remains voluntary. Any one that wants to go make a commune, go ahead, do it. I got nothing against it. As long as there's room to the individualist to do his or her own thing.
		-- Robert Anton Wilson
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Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior.
		-- Robert Anton Wilson
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The reaction always begins where one tries to bring life to a certain norm. That is why yesterday's revolutionaries so often become today's reactionaries.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of counter-revolution and for paving the way for socialism.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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Dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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In Russia, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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The view which sees in every capitalist only a profit machine may very well meet the demands of propaganda, but it is conceived much too narrowly and does not correspond to reality.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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We have come more and more under the dominance of mechanics and sacrificed living humanity to the dead rhythm of the machine without most of us even being conscious of the monstrosity of the procedure.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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The growth of technology at the expense of human personality, and especially the fatalistic submission with which the great majority surrender to this condition, is the reason why the desire for freedom is less alive among men today and has with many of them given place completely to a desire for economic security.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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For the machine, because of the way it is built, can work only in a given direction, no matter who pulls its levers.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian wing of the great workers' alliance.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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Organisation is, after all, only a means to an end. When it becomes an end in itself, it kills the spirit and the vital initiative of its members and sets up that domination by mediocrity which is the characteristic of all bureaucracies.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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True intellectual culture and the demand for higher interests in life does not become possible until man has achieved a certain material standard of living, which makes him capable of these.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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In the pettiest struggle, born of the needs of the moment, there must be mirrored the great goal of social liberation, and each such struggle must help to smooth the way and strengthen the spirit which transforms the inner longing of its bearers into will and deed.
		-- Rudolf Rocker
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For anarchists, the state is much more than an expression of class and economic power. Rather the state has its own logic of domination and self-perpetuation, and is autonomous from class interests.
		-- Saul Newman
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Anarchism is based on an essentially optimistic conception of human nature: if individuals have a natural tendency to get on well together then there is no need for the existence of a state to arbitrate between them.
		-- Saul Newman
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The collapse of communist systems nearly two decades ago led to a profound disillusionment in the west, not only with the communist project -- which had been in a state of crisis for some time -- but with radical left-wing politics generally.
		-- Saul Newman
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Overcoming the problem of voluntary servitude, which has proved such a hindrance to radical political projects in the past, implies this sort of ethical questioning of the self, an interrogation of one's subjective involvement and complicity with power.
		-- Saul Newman
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The category of the "worker," defined in the strict Marxian economic sense, and politically constituted through the revolutionary vanguard whose goal was the dictatorship of the proletariat, no longer seems viable.
		-- Saul Newman
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To monotonously live the mouldy hours of the ordinary people, the submissive, the accommodated, a life of convenience, is not living, it is only vegetating and carrying around an amorphous mass of flesh and bones. To life one should give the exquisite elevation of the rebellion of the arms and the mind.
		-- Severino Di Giovanni
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Let us light the fuse on the dynamite of vengeance!
		-- Severino Di Giovanni
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If this is the road we must take, we cannot do it sustained and fettered by some phoney unproductive sentimentalism without also setting obstacles in the path of what we seek to advance as the goal of energetic rebellion.
		-- Severino Di Giovanni
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Back down? No. Not even when -- at the end of the road -- with no means of escape, I find myself against the wall of death.
		-- Severino Di Giovanni
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We must ask in a manly and proud posture and not beg on our knees.
		-- Severino Di Giovanni
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From the earliest days of the "revolution", anarchists began their trek through moral tragedy along the paths of pain -- the deportations, the exile, the imprisonment, the ghastly persecution and the shootings. Such is the lot of anarchists today. Just as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow.
		-- Severino Di Giovanni
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I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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If this is the price to be paid for an idea, then let us pay. There is no need of being troubled about it, afraid, or ashamed. This is the time to boldly say, "Yes, I believe in the displacement of this system of injustice by a just one; I believe in the end of starvation, exposure, and the crimes caused by them."
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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I believe in the human soul regnant over all laws which man has made or will make; I believe there is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another; I believe in the total disintegration and dissolution of the principle and practice of authority; I am an anarchist, and if for this you condemn me, I stand ready to receive your condemnation.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Anarchism... teaches the possibility of a society in which the needs of life may be fully supplied for all, and in which the opportunities for complete development of mind and body shall be the heritage of all.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Anarchism seeks to arouse the consciousness of oppression, the desire for a better society, and a sense of the necessity for unceasing warfare against capitalism and the State.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Every anarchist, as an anarchist, would be perfectly willing to surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another worked better.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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First, then, God, being all-just, wishes to do justice; being all-wise, knows what justice is; being all-powerful, can do justice. Why then injustice?
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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A man won't steal, ordinarily, unless that which he steals is something he cannot as easily get without stealing; in liberty the cost of stealing would involve greater difficulties than producing, and consequently he would not be apt to steal.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Did the seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect liberty to undo in a moment what oppression has been doing for ages?
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of nature.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought equity anywhere -- LIBERTY!
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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The spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny -- the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously upon the wide one. Preach the wide one, or do not preach at all; but do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his convictions, was a direct actionist.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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The Puritans had accused the Quakers of "troubling the world by preaching peace to it." They refused to pay church taxes; they refused to bear arms; they refused to swear allegiance to any government.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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There is one common struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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The most that a working-class party could do, even if its politicians remained honest, would be to form a strong faction in the legislatures which might, by combining its vote with one side or another, win certain political or economic palliatives.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method? Which is more necessary, the sunshine or the rain? They are contradictory -- yes; they destroy each other -- yes, but from this destruction the flowers result.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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There are some whose nature it is to think and plead, and yield and yet return to the address, and so make headway in the minds of their fellowmen; and there are others who are stern and still, resolute, implacable as Judah's dream of God; -- and those men strike -- strike once and have ended. But the blow resounds across the world.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Socialism and communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal anarchism.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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The social order of Spain ought to be overthrown; must be overthrown, will be overthrown; and Ferrer was doing a mighty work in that direction. The men who killed him knew and understood it well.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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I think it can be clearly proven that the mental constitution of woman, like that of man, has never failed to rise where restrictions upon equal freedom have been torn down.
		-- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.
		-- William Godwin
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If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.
		-- William Godwin
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Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
		-- William Godwin
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The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.
		-- William Godwin
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The true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.
		-- William Godwin
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